Things You Only Know If You’re Childless – And Not By Choice

It starts in earnest after Valentine’s Day. At least, that’s when I notice it. However hard I try, I can’t ignore the whirlwind of Mother’s Day. Every shop window and every chalkboard is promoting it. And in doing so, they offer up the starkest reminder (as if one were needed) that this celebration is for mums... and I’m not one. And at 40, having been through five gruelling cycles of IVF and grieved over four miscarriages, it’s unlikelier with each passing month that I ever will be.

Those experiences serve to make Mother’s Day even harder to bear, because if the stars had aligned differently, my husband and I would be chasing around after our three kids and preparing for the arrival of our fourth child.

I don’t resent mothers, nor do I begrudge them for being the subject of all this indulgence. It’s only one day after all, despite the weeks of build-up. But being childless through circumstance has left a bitter taste. Aside from feeling bereft, it’s made me painfully aware of my otherness.

The messages society heaps on to women both subliminally and explicitly are that unless you’ve borne a child, you’re less than, incomplete. My journey has been extremely difficult and relentless. Anyone who’s travelled the road of infertility and unsuccessful fertility treatment knows that it chips away at you, bit by bit.

It strips you of all confidence, self-worth and purpose, and breaks you utterly. It deprives you of hope and leaves a shell of a person you don’t recognise. You do your best to package it all up and put it to one side, so you can get on with life. And I’m content, and I know I’m blessed in countless ways.

But when Mother’s Day comes around each year, it brings with it a not-so-subtle reminder that I’m disenfranchised as a woman. All the grief and anger I’ve accumulated trying to have a baby is thrown up in the air and falls down around me, like a game of pick-up sticks.

So, every March, I brace myself. I avoid the high street. I stay off social media. I delete unsolicited and unwanted marketing emails. That task is made easier by the likes of Bloom & Wild, the retailer that gave subscribers the choice to opt out of Mother’s Day emails last year, and others that have followed suit. It helps women like me realise we’re not the only ones who find this day hard. It signals that we’re getting better at acknowledging that childlessness isn’t always a choice; that not everyone who doesn’t have kids is childfree by design.

This Mother’s Day, I’ll surround myself with my husband, my dogs and my own mum, who I’m lucky to have. And I’ll revel in the fact that, instead of once a year, I can enjoy a lie-in whenever I like.

Things You Only Know If..